Are Families Necessary? As human children are unusual

Are Families Necessary?
   As human children are unusually dependent for an unusually long time, it’s obvious that every society must provide a domestic context in which the children are brought up and educated.
   The problem, however, is that we assume that the family, in the sense of a domestic household, ought to be the same as the family considered as parents and children.
   In present day English, the word "family" has two meanings: firstly, the domestic group of parents and children; and secondly, a network of relations, for example, the set of people who might be expected to turn up at a wedding or a funeral. At the first level, my brothers and sisters and myself are all in the same family as children, but in different ones as parents; but at the second level, we are all in the same family from start to finish.
   Despite some modifications over the last century, the wife is still presumed to be very much the junior partner in a marriage.  It’s normally the wife’s career that has to be reshaped to fit the husband’s, not the other way round. The dependence of children on their mother is exploited in a wholly unreasonable way to make the wife-mother the slave of the household. This is all tied up with the fact that, in our industrial system, job-changing and commuting tends to scatter the members of a family, and the harassed wife-mother finds it more and more difficult to rely on her relations for practical assistance.
   As nuclear families become more isolated, families of relations become more dispersed. The young mother can still talk to her Mum on the phone, but she can’t ask her to drop in for a few minutes to watch. the baby. Ideas about the status of women have been changing: wives are thought to be the companions of their husbands rather than their slaves. But perhaps they are more thoroughly enslaved to their children than before.
   The point is that there doesn’t seem to be any solution. There is a genuine clash between the right of the woman to be treated as a free and self-respecting individual, and the right of the child to demand care and attention. We have created for ourselves three ideals: social equality of men and women; permanence of the marriage; and lifelong love and cooperation between parents and children. However, we have created a social system in which it’s quite impossible for these factors to co-exist.
   It is not so much, then, a question of whether the family’s a necessity, but whether it’s at all possible.